The past two decades have witnessed a trend towards the use of fixedtermand part-time contracts in higher education in the UK, where over athird of routine academic work is now carried out by staff on fixed-termcontracts (Ainley 1994). As Kogan et al. (1994: 53) have noted, thisincreased casualisation of academic labour has been driven by the need foruniversities and colleges to reduce labour costs. The move towards a more‘flexible’ and cheaper workforce is largely a response to governmentalresource restrictions and the need to cope with increased student numbers(Kogan et al. 1994). In order to cope with financial pressures, universitieshave increasingly sought to diversify their funding and become moreentrepreneurial in attracting income from sources other than the government(Wasser 1990; Ziman 1991). External research grants and contractsplay an increasingly important role in the finances of many institutions,with a concomitant rise in the number of researchers employed on fixedtermcontracts.In the UK, numbers have been growing since the 1970s (Norris et al.1992), with currently over 35,000 of these researchers across all academicdisciplines. In 1995/96, nearly 4,000 academic staff in the social scienceswere on fixed-term contracts, which included a research element, and2,400 of these were employed exclusively on research (HESA 1995/96).Moreover, there are indications that the occupational structure of contractresearch reflects wider social disparities, with women under-represented atsenior research grades and over-represented at junior levels (Court et al.1996: 25).Despite increasing numbers of contract researchers, their importancefor the research profile of universities and colleges and the publication of aconcordat on their career management (CVCP 1996), relatively littleresearch has been published on the occupational lives of this marginalisedgroup. Knowledge generally centres upon the inequalities suffered byfixed-term staff in comparison to academics employed on ‘permanent’contracts. Poor salaries, reduced holidays and sickness benefits, lack ofsecurity, little if any career development, and inadequate pension provision are some of the factors which make it difficult for most researchers totolerate their marginalised status for the duration of a ‘career’ in academia.It is considered an inefficient system for training and maintaining askilled research workforce (NATFHE n.d; Norris et al. 1992; Ransom1992; AUT 1995) when so many well-qualified, trained researchers aredriven to leave research at a relatively early age due to lack of economicsecurity. Additionally, it is also highly wasteful for the higher educationsystem when the employment of skilled and talented researchers is so fragmented(Pettigrew 1994), and the quality of research output is negativelyaffected by researchers’ worries about job security (NATFHE 1995).Contract researchers represent a ‘growing pool of expertise’ (Pettigrew1994: 48), and yet little is known about the intricacies and complexities oftheir occupational lives (Brown 1994). As Delamont et al. (1994) haveobserved, knowledge about the reproduction of academic occupationalculture is sparse, and has concentrated upon teaching staff, paying scantattention to other occupational cultures within the higher education sector(Delamont 1996).